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Tuesday, 3 January 2017

Painting Kallistra Late War British Step-by-step

I thought I'd do a step-by-step guide to how I've been painting my Late WW1 12mm British.
Much of what follows is based on advice from James Morris and is done to ensure my models at least make a basic match with his when we use them on the same table.
Also a hat-tip to Over Open Sights blog, who kindly sent me his painting guide for 28mm models last year, which also informed my pass at these much smaller miniatures.
Most of the paints I used are OOP GW ones, but there are various conversion charts out there that should allow you to find an equivalent.

First, glue your models to bases:

Then apply PVA to the base and dunk in chinchilla sand:

Next spray the entire model with Army Painter Leather Brown spray (which I got from Nice Mr Nick at Northstar)
It appears I forgot to photograph this stage. Imagine the same models as above. Only much browner. Or the ones below with less greeny uniform colour on.

Then paint all the uniforms with Vallejo British Uniform. You don't need to be too neat at this point as most of the subsequent stages will tidy up any over-spill onto other areas, but try and not paint the rifles.

Then paint the gas mask case any covered helmets and assorted other pouches with Kommando Khaki:

You can hardly see what I've done here, so it's possibly not even worth it, but I painted the puttees with Graveyard Earth:

Next I added skin with Tallarn Flesh:

Followed by helmets using Orkhide Shade:

Another optional step - footwear with CDA Chestnut Brown and then I painted bayonets with Bolt Gun Metal (not optional):

Finally I tided up officer's sticks and leather pouches and holsters with Bestial Brown:

And painted the Lewis guns in Chaos Black:

Then the final stage was to cover them all over with CDA Dark Brown Super Wash.
Hey presto - six stands painted (though I appear to have only taken pictures of five):

The key, I think, with these small models is to pick out the contrasting bits that will help them pop a little on the table from four or so feet away. So the helmets are probably greener than they should be and the cases and pouches probably a shade or two too light, but at wargaming distance they'll make the models distinctive on the tabletop.

The blank spots on a couple of the bases are created by adding blobs of Blu-Tack to the base before applying the PVA, then removing before the glue has dried. These will be later painted with Storm Blue and given a Black Ink wash and coat of Gloss Varnish to create dark shiny pools in the Flanders mud.
You can see the finished models against blue backgrounds in the post from earlier this week